External Harddrives......any differences?

[shadowmoses]

If you are going to make your own external HD make sure you buy a Case with a fan as it will need it to run optimally and stay cool, as for the hard drive to put in i would reccomend a Seagate on the merit they have a 5 year warranty.

Building your own External Hard drive will always be the cheapest option, but if you decide to go for a ready built external Hard Drive i would go for LaCie although they seem pricey they are a good purchase as they are quality products and will serve you well...

ShadOW 😉

 

[cube]

(Oxford being the one company backed by people here)

Just to be sure: Oxford does not make enclosures. They make chipsets from which enclosures are built.

 

[pna]

Just to be sure: Oxford does not make enclosures. They make chipsets from which enclosures are built.

Exactly -- you should be looking at the specs for any enclosure you're thinking of buying for 'oxford 911' chipset if it's firewire 400 (the most common), or 'oxford 922' chipset if it's FW 800. It's certainly the most recommended chipset, and most of the enclosures use them. Still, you definitely want to make sure before you buy one blind.

Oh, and full disclosure for Abstract -- I did have a seagate I thought was dying in a linux/win98/win2000 machine and thought it was going to break the streak. But then I just threw it in a macally enclosure, formatted it hfs+, and all is good...

Also, the comment about making sure you have a fan in the enclosure is valid -- enclosures with fans will definitely keep the hard drive cooler than ones without. That being said, all of the fans they use in those things are small and fairly annoy to have to listen to. Hard drives will likely last a long time even in a non-fan-cooled enclosure, so you have to weigh the pros and cons of having another source of annoying noise in your workspace. That's why I think the 5 year warranty of the seagates is more important if you're buying to put in an enclosure than otherwise, I fully realize that running them in my fanless enclosure isn't optimal for their longevity.

And I notice no one else chimed in to say that they'd had a seagate die on them. So maybe I am right after all... 🙄

 

[Zachariah]

... The RMA process was fairly painless ...

that was actually one of the main reasons I'm satisfied with WD -- I expect drives to die, so that part is important.

Also, there was a problem with 20GB drives a while back, but that was the only major problem in the past few years that I noticed.

 

[Xeem]

I'd just like to say that every Maxtor drive I have ever owned had died suddenly and miserably. They are the only hard drives I've ever owned that have died in less than five years, and although Maxtor makes good on the warranty, I refuse to go through the process of recovering lost data from a dead drive more than once, as was the case in my external Maxtor 80 GB. It died under warranty, was replaced, died again, was replaced, and its replacement is dead too. My dad has ten or so Lacie Firewire drives in his office that have never given him problems.

 

[iMeowbot]

Also, the comment about making sure you have a fan in the enclosure is valid -- enclosures with fans will definitely keep the hard drive cooler than ones without. That being said, all of the fans they use in those things are small and fairly annoy to have to listen to.

Yeah, the noise can be a really big problem, especially since they like to keep case sizes reasonable by going with tiny fans at high speeds.
We've been using 2.5-inch 80GB Samsung dealies in aluminumininium cases lately, they're nice and quiet and reasonably fast and cheap. Being notebook drives, the power/heat issues aren't as serious. (Here, portability and quiet are more important than the ultimate in capacity or speed, and the cost of iPods was starting to add up 🙁 ) One nifty bonus of going cheaper is that all these little cases seem to use blue LEDs lately, and anything blue is inherently good.

 

[tuartboy]

</begin nitpick>

63, if you use hubs. The max. daisy chain depth should not exceed 8 devices.​

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<nitpick>
That's not valid tag usage!
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😉

Ok, enough with my elitist joke...

One small consideration: USB uses the cpu as a controller. FW is pretty much independent of your system resources. Therefore, firewire should theoretically be faster/better/nicer.

 

[ebow]

I find it interesting that many people strongly recommend getting an enclosure with an Oxford 911 or 922 chipset but there are also many recommendations for the Macally PHR-100AC whose writeups (and product page) say nothing about using an Oxford chipset. Is this a matter of "get the Oxford chipset, unless you're getting this Macally unit"?

Also, anyone know how I can guarantee that I'll get the model with the power switch if I order through Newegg? It looks like it may vary. Or maybe the change to with-switch models happened just recently. Might be worth the "risk" to get such a good price from a reliable retailer, though.

 

[Ti_Poussin]

http://www.macworld.com/2005/05/reviews/fwharddrivesdesktop/index.php

Should help you, I personnally bought an enclosure and a drive separatly, cost less. Take an enclosure with a Oxford 911 chipset, they transfer faster but cost a little more. Take a quiet one, save your ears!